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Padding into the bathroom, s
he splashed her face and dried it. Who had switched the light off? It must have been Luc. He had come to her and she had been fast asleep. She lifted a weak hand to her forehead where the pounding in her temples was only slowly steadying. It was impossible to stifle a sudden, desperate, tearing need to be with him.
She approached the door in her bedroom which she assumed connected with his. Finding it locked, she frowned and crept out on to the gallery, dimly wondering what time it was. The bedroom itself was in darkness when she entered, but a triangle of light was spilling from the open bathroom door. She could hear a shower running and she smiled. It couldn’t be that late. She scrambled into the turned-back bed as quietly as a mouse.
The shower went off and the light almost simultaneously. A second or two later the bedroom curtains were drawn back. Luc unlatched one of the windows and stood there in the moonlight, magnificently naked, towelling his hair dry.
He was asking to catch his death of cold but the urge to announce her presence dwindled. Whipcord muscles flexed taut beneath the smooth golden skin of his back. Her mouth ran dry. Feeling mortifyingly like a voyeur, she closed her eyes. The mattress gave slightly with his weight and three-quarters of the sheet was wrenched from her.
As he rolled over, punching a pillow and narrowly missing her head, he came into sudden contact with her. ‘Dio!’ Jerking semi-upright, he lunged at the light above the bed before she could prevent him.
One hand braced tautly on the carved headboard, he stared down at her in shock. ‘Catherine?’
She could feel one of those ghastly beetroot blushes crawling in a tide over her exposed skin. Somehow his tone implied that the very last place he expected to find her was in his bed. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
He slid lower on the mattress, surveying her intently, his cheekbones harshly accentuated. ‘No more could I. Come here.’ He reached out with a determined hand and brought her close, not giving her time to respond to what was more of a command than a request. ‘I want you,’ he admitted roughly. ‘Do you have any idea how much I want you?’
‘I’m here,’ she whispered, suddenly shy of him.
Bending his dark head, he muttered something ferocious in Italian and crushed her lips apart with a savage urgency that took her very much by surprise. His tongue ravished the tender interior of her mouth. She might have been a life-saving draught to a male driven to the edge of madness by thirst. He bruised her lips and drank deep and long until her head swam and she couldn’t breathe. Fire as elemental as he was leapt through her veins.
Her hands found his shoulders. He was burning up as though he had a fever, his skin hot and dry, his long, hard body savagely tense against hers. Lean fingers fumbled with an unusual lack of dexterity at the silk that concealed her from him. With a stifled growl of frustration, he drew back and tore the whisper-fine fabric apart with impatient hands.
‘Luc!’ Catherine surfaced abruptly from a drowning well of passion and fixed shocked eyes on him as he knelt over her, trailing the torn remnants from her and tossing them carelessly aside. As she made an instinctive attempt to cover herself from his devouring scrutiny, he caught at her wrists and flattened them to the bed.
‘Please.’ It was a word he very rarely employed and there was a note in that roughened plea that stabbed at her heart and made her ache.
Brilliant golden eyes ran over her in a look as physical as touch, exploring the burgeoning swell of her breasts, the smoothness of her narrow ribcage, the feminine curve of her hips and the soft curls at the juncture of her thighs.
‘Squisita…perfetta,’ he muttered raggedly as he drew her towards him, and his mouth swooped down to capture a taut nipple.
Her back arched as a whimper of formless sound was torn from her throat. He suckled her tender flesh with an intensely erotic enjoyment that drove her wild. He bit with subtle delicacy, his hand toying with the neglected twin, shaping, tugging, exciting until she was writhing beneath his ministrations. She wanted his weight on her and he denied her, lifting his head only to trail the tip of his tongue teasingly down between her breasts, traversing the pale skin of her ribs and dipping into the hollow of her navel.
Her hands dug into his hair and tightened in immediate protest as he strung a line of wholly determined kisses from the bend of her knee to the smooth inner skin of her thigh, tensing tiny muscles she didn’t know she possessed. And then her neck extended and her head fell back on the pillows. A cry fled her lips, all thought arrested as she sank into the seduction of pure sensation and was lost in the frantic clamour of her own body.
At the peak of an excitement more of agony than pleasure, Catherine cried out his name, and his hands curved hard to her hips as he rose above her, silencing her with the tormenting force of his mouth. Against her most tender flesh, he was hot and insistent. For a split second he stared down at her, desire and demand stamped in his dark, damp features, and then he moved, thrusting deep as a bolt of lightning rending the heavens.
Pain clenched her, unexpected enough to dredge her briefly from the driving, all-enveloping hunger for satisfaction that he had induced. He stilled, dealt her a look in which tenderness and triumph blazed, more blatant than speech, and pressed a fleeting benediction of a kiss to her brow. He muttered something about doubting her and never doubting her again.
She was in no condition to absorb what he was saying. With tiny, subtle, circling movements of his hips, he was inciting her to passion again, accustoming her to his fullness. All conscious thought was suspended. She was lost in the primal rhythm of giving all and taking everything, driven mindless and powerless towards that final shattering release. When it came in wave after wave of unbelievable pleasure, it was sublime.
His harsh groan of masculine satisfaction still echoing in her ears, she let her hands rove possessively over his sweat-dampened skin. Obtrusive questions licked at the corners of her mind. Had it ever been that profound, that overwhelming before? She remembered excitement, but not an excitement that swept her so quickly into oblivion. She remembered his hunger, but not a hunger that threatened to rage out of control in its raw intensity. She remembered the sweet joy of fulfilment, but not a fulfilment that stole her very soul with its fiery potency.
And she also remembered…sadly…that Luc was invariably halfway to the shower by now, shunning with that essential detachment of his the aftermath of passion when she had so desperately wanted him to stay in her arms.
He was holding her now as if at any moment she might make a break for freedom, and the awareness provoked a deep rush of tenderness within her. She rubbed her cheek lovingly against a strong brown shoulder. He shifted languorously like a sleek cat stretching beneath a caress, as unashamedly physical in his enjoyment as any member of the animal kingdom.
‘I had a very strange dream.’ She broke the silence hesitantly, afraid that the magic might escape. ‘I don’t know if it was a memory.’
Tension snaked through his relaxed length. ‘What was it?’
‘You’ll probably laugh.’
‘I promise I won’t. Tell me.’
‘I was writing on a mirror,’ she whispered. ‘Can you imagine that? I never write anything but my name unless I can help it, and there I was, writing on this mirror!’
‘Amazing,’ he murmured softly.
